Of course the day after I wrote about the limited potential profitably of a career based on reality television, Abercrombie and Fitch ups the ante by offering Jersey Shore‘s Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino money to stop wearing their clothes. Ta-Nehisi wonders if it’s about class. And that’s potentially true — Abercrombie aspires to be sexier than J. Crew, though less trashy than American Apparel, and it’s done an inconsistent job of policing its brand. Sometimes, A&F’s sought to push buttons by engaging progressive issues, as it did with its Whitney & Beth Marriage campaign in 2000, which invited catalogue readers to a wedding between two women, though the responses included “No… I’m liberal, but not that liberal” and “Yes… I’d love to see two women get married.” More frequently, it’s in the news for, say, having a store worker with a prosthetic arm work in the stockroom rather than the store floor to avoid offending shoppers who might see having a physical disability as inconsistent with Abercrombie’s desired image of athletic sexuality, or settling class-action lawsuits filed by minority employees and job applicants.

But this case seems more like a ploy for attention and marketing buzz than anything else. Last year, the company was selling “The Fituation” t-shirts. This year, Mike’s kind of a skeeze, making a transparent play for an (at least temporarily taken) Snooki. Abercrombie’s move is a win for both of them: the company gets to position itself as America and treat Mike like he’s a creep, and Mike gets to redeem himself slightly by pointing out how ridiculous they’re being. That doesn’t mean Abercrombie’s commercial interests are any less aligned with being racist, body-conformist creeps. But I’m not sure this is a case where anybody loses out.

Today in the Atlantic, because I have absolutely nothing left to say about Jersey Shore itself, I watched a bunch of the first spinoff of the show, the UK’s Geordie Shore, and wrote about what happens to the show’s formula when the cast is brought together along class lines instead of along fake ethnic ones:

England’s always had a fine-grained taxonomy of working-class sub-cultures. Geordies—a term for people from the Tyneside region of Northeast England—may not have always existed in their current form, but the regional nickname stretches at least all the way back to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, and certainly was in current usage by 1793. The stereotype Geordie Shore exploits is, as MSN TV Editor Lorna Cooper puts it in an email, that “all Geordies are thick, drink brown ale, say ‘why-aye-man’, have women that look like brick houses.” Of course, this has driven Geordies who aren’t on TV crazy. Part of the problem, Cooper says, is that the show and its audience have conflated a regional stereotype with a class one: While “Geordie” refers to the many residents of a geographic area, the Geordie Shore stars are all working class people who engage in all sorts of hard-partying anti-social behavior. They’re considered chavs.

“Ordinary working class people abhor both the moniker and the association,” Cooper says. “For us, chavs are akin to a level of underclass we look down on; the type of people that go on The Jeremy Kyle Show (think a British equivalent of Maury) for DNA testing to discover who’s the father.”

…

The Geordie Shore crew doesn’t seem to have figured out how to live as cartoon characters as easily as their American predecessors. A Brit’s Veet addiction may be mildly amusing, but it’s nothing to the panic of a Guidette in Italy with only eight cans of bronzer to last her through Grand Tour, or the delights of Pauly D’s blowout. The Geordie Shore cast also has more traditional working-class occupations, whether they answer phones in call centers or lay tile, while the Jersey Shore cast members who worked at all were club promoters or DJs or fitness-center managers. In a sense, they’d been in professional training for their star turn, ready to define Guido-ness for an eager nation. The precise elements of Geordie culture, though, remain something of a mystery after one season.

I don’t write that much about Jersey Shore both because the problems with it are so glaringly obvious and so baked into the formula of the show that it’s not worth much critique, and because for all of that, it is wildly, wildly entertaining. The show is kind of this wonderfully, awfully pure test of the belief that folks ought to be able to do whatever they want for money, and of the absolute imperviousness of these people to shame. I don’t think Snooki is going to be famous in 10 years, but I also think she’s going to be essentially OK. And I think part of that is Jersey Shore‘s basis in faux-ethnic identity rather than class. The show’s a piece of postmodern performance art that doesn’t really reflect back on anyone. The outrage about it seems largely feigned. It won’t be totally humiliating to have been on it 10 years later because of the self-aware quality of the whole enterprise. But folks in the U.K. seem genuinely upset about the Geordies.

In a piece checking in with some of the more flagrantly ridiculous reality show stars of recent years, Spencer and Heidi Pratt, of The Hills notoriety, Kate Arthur seems to confirm that the pair’s final fallout from MTV came when show producers tried to get Spencer to hit his sister, who has addiction issues, on camera:

He had gotten into a huge fight with a producer named Sara Mast, whom he said tried to get him to cause his fellow castmember and sister, Stephanie, who has had on-again, off-again alcohol and drug problems, to “hit rock bottom.” In his version, Mast tried to get him to punch Stephanie. “Her exact quote: ‘That Snooki effect,’” Spencer said, referring to a Jersey Shore episode in which castmember Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi was hit by a fellow bar patron.

“That’s when I snapped,” Spencer said. “To the point when I said—and this is when the producers got scared of me—‘You want me to punch my sister in the face? Are you trying to get me to kill you?’ I didn’t say, ‘I’m killing you.’ If I did, MTV would have had me arrested.”

A source close to production who requested anonymity, and is no friend of Spencer’s, confirmed his version of what caused the fight, but also added that Spencer was, in fact, quite scary about it. Through her agent, Sara Mast declined to comment for this story. Creator DiVello’s PR representative was told specifically about this claim and did not respond. MTV would not comment either.

I’m not incredibly sympathetic to people who can’t make the calculation that getting plastic surgery you don’t actually want to get a short-term payoff isn’t actually worth it. But if that actually happened, it’s a pretty disgusting thing to ask anyone to do, no matter how far. I try not to get moralistic about what kinds of popular culture get produced: as distasteful as I find, say, the existence of the Saw movies, I don’t think Eli Roth should be enjoined from making them. But there’s room for a real conversation about what it means that we’re really excited to see real women get punched in the face, whether by previously-anonymous gym teachers, or by their own brothers that doesn’t dismiss these shows as stupid, ironic flashes in the pan that we can afford to treat as if they’re unimportant. It’s incredibly easy to treat the genre as if it’s just a place where already odd people exhibit themselves, that would exist with or without our custom, an odd blind eye to the powerful capitalism that governs the rest of the industry.

We keep getting very excited about art about reality television—I was surprised to find, when I looked it up, that The Truman Show, which is about the morality of raising someone purely as a reality television experiment even if you give him as nice a life as possible, made $126 million domestically. And people have purchased millions of copies of The Hunger Games, which is more broadly about what it’s like to live under a murderously repressive dictatorship, but explores that theme largely through a reality television show, though it confines itself almost entirely to the question of what it’s like to participate in the production of that show and not to what it’s like to watch it. But the coverage of the adaptation of that series is focused much more on sexy bakers and brooding hunters and how good Jennifer Lawrence looks wielding a bow and arrow. We’re awfully good at making things phenomena while ignoring the parts of them that inconvenience us.